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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Idle thoughts: Edward Carson, the Ulster Covenant, and the Bronze Age

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On the 28th of September 1912 Sir Edward Carson
became the first person to sign the Ulster Covenant. I’m writing this on the 29th of September 2012 in East Belfast. As the closest Saturday to the anniversary,
Ulster’s Loyal Orders and their associated bands are out in force. Even here,
sheltered from the Upper Newtownards Road, I can still hear the pounding drum
beats and the high, tinny sound of the fife. In my back garden you can clearly
hear the drone of the police helicopter high above, obscured somewhere in the
broken cloud. Personally, I don’t ‘do’ politics. These days, all I’m looking
for in my elected representatives is to ensure that I can go on living a quiet,
peaceful life and that we are never again dragged into the dark days of
sectarian murder and hatred. On the other hand, this is a huge event that’s
happening on my doorstep – it would be remiss of me not to go and take a look.
With that in mind, I took a walk to the end of my street with my family to get
a sense of the scale of this huge parade. I have no comment to make on the rights or
wrongs of such large-scale marching, nor on any point of modern politics (and I
would be grateful if any readers wishing to leave a comment would refrain from
the same). However, it did make me think of what the archaeologists of the
future would make of Belfast and our political divide in, say, a thousand
years. In the year 3012 the Belfast Archaeological Research Project (BARP)
would find that all the flags and emblems of both sides had long since rotted
away and that even the paint on the kerbstones and gable walls had not stood
the test of time. The physical remains of the city could tell you stories about
the differences between rich and poor – some sets of house foundations set
within larger grounds could be equated as belonging to the better-off end of
society as opposed to smaller, more cramped terraces in other parts of town.
But what of our political differences? There are rich and poor on both sides,
so there will be no discernible differences between the houses of one side and
the other. Similarly, our material culture is pretty uniform, so there will be
little to differentiate our refuse. Despite jokes about the distance between
eye-sockets, there is no physical difference between our skeletons. I once
heard that the Catholic church insisted that there be a large underground wall
(not visible on the surface) built in the city cemetery to divide their dead
from those of the Protestants. I have no idea if this is true, but it may cause
some head-scratching for the archaeologists at BARP. Similarly, most churches and places of Christian worship are pretty standard in plan, so there will be little to tell them apart. That
said, there may be questions as to why we appeared to require so many
‘ritual/ceremonial structures’. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not belittling
anyone’s right to express their culture/religion/politics in any way they like
(nor anyone else’s right to be offended by it) – I simply don’t care. My point
is just that, despite our perceived modern differences in belief, that
archaeologists at BARP would have extreme difficulty in telling us apart – who
were the Unionists and the Loyalists? Who were the Republicans and the Nationalists?

Going beyond our modern time, this line of
thinking eventually got me derailed into considering what Ireland may have been
like in, say, the middle of the Bronze Age. Could it have been similar to
today? As archaeologists we look at the material culture of the period and, to
a large extent, perceive homogeneity. The people of the time lived in broadly
similar structures, and while there were a variety of ways of disposing of the
dead, they are essentially ‘Bronze Age’ in character. Similarly, while their
material culture – tools, weapons, etc. – show chronological development we
would be hard-pressed to divine subtler divisions relating to
political/religious world views. In Cleary & Kelleher’s excellent monograph
on the Neolithic site at Tullahedy (I’m working on a review of it for this
blog, honest!), Farina Sternke observes that the main focus of stone tool
production was the creation and refurbishment of leaf/lozenge-shaped
arrowheads. She asks the questions – what was the need for such an arsenal? If
they were for the defence of the site, then who were the ‘enemies’? Although it
is beyond the scope of her work at Tullahedy, she suggests that an examination
of the site in the context of place and territoriality in Neolithic Ireland as
a viable avenue for future research. When it comes to examining changes to
sites and monuments over time, it is relatively common to invoke changes in
polity and ritual as explanations. In my own case, I presented just such a
narrative as a means of explanation of how a presumed central burial at a ring
barrow ended up in the ditch at Gortlaunaght, Co. Cavan. The pottery was Early
Bronze Age, but the dates from the charcoal in the ditch were Late Bronze Age.
My scenario (presented, I hasten to add, as only one possibility among many)
was that changing cultural practices and political upheavals in the Late Bronze
Age may have resulted in the deliberate ‘slighting’ of older monuments to
demonstrate the wielding of power by a newly enfranchised elite. As I say, it’s
a commonly enough used device in explaining and understanding change in archaeology.In
the whirl of today’s commemorations, my idle thoughts have led me to a new
question. What would it have been like several hundred years into this new
Bronze Age religious/political sphere? In terms of archaeological visibility,
everyone is now living a nice, modern, Bronze Age lifestyle in their nice
roundhouses, with their occasional bronze weapons and gold jewellery. But what
of the people? Are they really that homogenous? Could there not have been
societal divisions where part of the population still associated themselves
with the ‘incoming’ set of ideas, while another considered themselves to be
‘native’ in their background. At a remove of several generations from the
genesis of such a society all such distinctions are (in terms of the physical
evidence, at least) unimportant – in today’s terms Unionists and Nationalists
are vastly politically different, but they share a material culture: both sides
have flat-screen TVs, broadband internet, and drive VW Polos (etc.) – it’s not like one side are all
‘modern’ and the other lot are grimly living in the 17th century, with their
muskets, horse-drawn carts, and exciting, woodblock printed monthly journals.
Similarly, in my hypothetical Bronze Age scenario, you can accommodate multiple
traditions with competing/mutually exclusive mental cultural maps and landscapes, yet
sharing a near identical lifestyle.

The other idle though of mine today was about
the strong cohesive (and simultaneously divisive) power of such ceremonial
activities as marching and parading. I know there are plenty who see it as an
oppressive force, deliberately and aggressively flaunting its authority and
ascendancy. On the other hand, the scene near my house was of large numbers of
people feeling part of a shared history, culture and community. These views are
mutually exclusive, but each has something to recommend them. As I say, I have
no interest in passing comment on modern political divisions. Initially I was
thinking of the fantastic corpus of
Irish Bronze Age Horns and how they could have been used in just such a way –
loud droning instruments to attract attention: invoking positive feelings of
inclusion and acceptance in one social group and precisely the opposite in
another. The serious suggestion in all of this that, perhaps, we should attempt
to move beyond studies of manufacture and deposition of these instruments and
begin to look at them in terms of the political/religious power that they may
have had – not just to bind a society together, but to highlight differences
too. I’ve probably already pushed this argument too far, but I may as well be
hung for a sheep as a lamb: in writing all this it has just struck me how
similar the gold lunulae and gorgets are to the sashes worn by the members of
the Orange Order. Both can be seen as demonstrating affiliation with one
particular cultural ideology. Perhaps the Bronze Age goldwork too had specific
connotations that evoked differing responses from different groups of spectators.
I’m not sure how one would go about searching for, or drawing out, such threads
of cultural dissonance, but perhaps they are there to be found by the right
researchers. In any case, they can’t ever be found unless someone raises the
possibility that they might exist at all. Overall, I am suggesting that we need
to develop a more nuanced approach to past societies, and attempt to see
beneath any apparent homogeneity and reflect how different elements within that
society regard the outcomes of power shifts and religious/ceremonial changes.In the meantime, I present a small selection of photographs from the parade as it passed near my house and remind ourselves that, despite whatever political views we have that may divide us, we have culturally much more that unites us!

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